Page 1 of Murder in the Family

The Times,8 November 2023

TELEVISION

And then there was one

Christie-worthy final twist givesInfamousa killer climax

ROSS LESLIE

The latest series ofInfamousbowed out yesterday with a last-gasp twist that didn’t just bring the house down but the whole theatre with it.

It’s been the standout hit of Showrunner’s autumn season, never out of the streamer’s top ten shows since the first episode aired on 3rd October, and generating the sort of water-cooler debates those of us who remember a terrestrial-only world look back on with wistful nostalgia. As I said, back when it first launched, it must have taken guts to hold out for a gradual episode drop rather than cave to the prevailing box-binge culture, but boy, it paid off. Not least because it allowed real-life off-screen events to be incorporated into last night’s double-episode series finale.

This season’s format was a first for the Infamous franchise, and I suspect, for many of the viewers, but however innovative it might have felt, the closing sequence of last night’s final episode proved that what we’d been watching all these weeks was, in fact, a very modern reprise of the time-honoured And Then There Were None scenario, first created by Agatha Christie, and re-invented by every new generation of crime novelists ever since, most notably by the late great PD James, but also, more recently, by the likes of Lucy Foley and Sarah Pearse. A small group of strangers, cut off from the outside world, who begin to turn on one another in the face of the horrifying realization that there is a killer among them, hiding in plain sight.

For so it proved last night. And no, of course I’m not going to tell you who. Let’s just say I won’t be the only member of the audience who’s promptly re-watching the entire series, to see how I could possibly have missed it …

@RLeslieTV

Ten months earlier

Showrunner

January 9, 2023

New Season of ‘Infamous’ sees British Film-maker Revisiting His Stepfather’s Murder, Unsolved for 20 Years

Filming On-Location in London, ‘Who Killed Luke Ryder?’ Will Include Never-Before-Seen Home Video Footage, Interviews with Family Members, and Exclusive Access to the Crime Scene

‘Infamous: Who Killed Luke Ryder?’ Set to Debut Tuesday October 3 (9:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m. EST) on Showrunner

In Season 7 of the global hit ‘Infamous’, film-maker Guy Howard will take viewers through the case that traumatized him as a child, and has haunted his family for two decades. In October 2003, when Howard was 10, his stepfather, Luke Ryder, was found dead in the garden of the family home in an upscale district of London. Despite a lengthy and high-profile investigation by British law enforcement, no charges were ever brought, and the case remains unsolved.

In a new format for the ‘Infamous’ franchise, producer Nick Vincent of Dry Riser Films has brought together key players in the original case, along with acknowledged experts in the fields of Crime Scene Investigation, forensic psychology, police investigation, and the law, to revisit the crime and attempt to identify the perpetrator, who still remains at large. Participants include:

Alan Canning

Detective Inspector, Metropolitan Police (Ret.)

Mitchell Clarke

Journalist, covered the case for the London press in 2003

Hugo Fraser KC

Leading UK criminal prosecutor

Dr Laila Furness

Forensic psychologist

JJ Norton

Crime Scene Investigator, South Wales Police

William R. Serafini

Detective, NYPD (Ret.)